An online commerce platform is a computer information system provided by a platform service provider to facilitate online trading. Online commerce platforms can realize online trading between sellers and buyers. On an online commerce platform, a potential buyer may retrieve an advertising source provided by a seller by inputting certain keywords. Under the bid ranking model on the Internet, the mapping between advertising sources (e.g., text files, images, etc.) provided by sellers and corresponding keywords (i.e., bought words or units) is referred to as a match between the advertising sources and the keywords. A seller may display advertisements comprising one or more advertising sources by paying for certain keywords. For example, if a seller paid for a keyword “book”, then an advertising source (e.g., text file, image, etc.) specified by the seller is to be displayed to a potential buyer when a search word entered by the potential buyer is mapped to the keyword “book” under a certain rule. The seller benefits from such a match between keywords and advertising sources. Resulting activities that benefit the seller, such as click-through of the ads by the potential buyer, inquiry by the potential buyer or transaction with the potential buyer, etc., are referred to as the seller's gains.
In existing online trading platforms, an advertising source provided by the seller is retrieved based on a certain match when the potential buyer inputs a set of query keywords. The match is typically generated based on how new an advertising source is (the latest advertising source is normally of priority), and whether a match between an advertising source and the keyword may bring the maximum gain for the advertising source. For example, a seller has two advertising sources, “selling various mobile phones” and “selling imported mobile phones”, to be associated with three sets of keywords “mobile phones”, “Nokia mobile phones” and “Apple mobile phones”. Assuming each advertising source can only be associated with at most two sets of keywords and different associations may bring for the seller the following gain levels on a scale of 1-10: 10, if “selling various mobile phones” is matched to “mobile phones”; 7, if “selling various mobile phones” is matched to “Nokia mobile phones”; 6, if “selling various mobile phones” is matched to “Apple mobile phones”; 9, if “selling imported mobile phones” is matched to “mobile phones”; 7, if “selling imported mobile phones” is matched to “Nokia mobile phones”; and 5, if “selling imported mobile phones” is matched to “Apple mobile phones”. Assume that the matches between the advertising sources and the sets of keywords generated according to the existing technique are the following: the advertising source “selling various mobile phones” is matched to the keywords “mobile phones” (gain of 10) and “Nokia mobile phones” (gain of 7), and the advertising source “selling imported mobile phones” is matched to the keyword “Apple mobile phones” (gain of 5), then the match would bring the seller a total gain of 22 (i.e., 10+7+5).
However, in the foregoing example, there is also a match between the advertising sources and the keyword sets that associates “selling various mobile phones” with “mobile phones” (gain of 10) and “Apple mobile phones” (gain of 6), and associates “selling imported mobile phones” with “Nokia mobile phones” (gain of 7). This match would bring the seller a total gain of 23. It can be seen that, in practice, when advertising sources provided by the seller have a limited number of matching keyword sets, if we only consider the latest advertising sources, or if we set a match between advertising sources and keywords only based on whether the match may bring the maximum gain for the current advertising source or a group of similar advertising sources, we may obtain a match between advertising sources and keywords that does not necessarily represent every product area offered by the seller. As a result, some of the product areas by the seller may have no or few advertising sources that match a keyword set. In such a case, the potential buyer may not obtain a corresponding qualified advertising source when inputting a keyword set to perform product retrieval. And if the potential buyer repeats his search, retrieval performance of the online trading platform server will also be degraded. Further, the existing method for generating the match between advertising sources and keywords may not bring the maximum gain for the seller.